When people talk about the men who killed American paratroopers in Vietnam, they usually mention the NVA, the ambushes, the mines, and the tunnels. And those were terrifying. But on one hilltop in November 1967, the deadliest thing in the sky over the 173rd Airborne Brigade was not an enemy weapon. It was an American bomb.

 For 5 days, one battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade tried to take a hill called 875 in Vietnam Central Highlands. When they finally reached the summit on Thanksgiving Day, they ate cold turkey standing on ground where their own priest had been killed by their own bombs 4 days earlier. This is how it happened.

 Some of what happened on that hill is not hard to understand. It is hard to accept. And they knew it. They were the first major US Army ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam, arriving at Bien Hoa in May 1965. They called themselves the Sky Soldiers, and their infantry, the 503rd, traced its lineage to the Corregidor parachute assault of 1945.

 By November 1967, they had 2 years of Vietnam behind them. Bob Feren, who served with them, put the self-image plainly, “Paratroopers do not lose battles. They take a great many casualties because of it.” In the last week of October 1967, intelligence reports placed NVA units near the town of Dak To in Kontum Province, a remote sector of the Central Highlands 2 and 1/2 mi from the Cambodian border.

 General Westmoreland, pursuing a strategy of attrition along Vietnam’s borders, rushed 16 battalions into the province. What they were walking into had been planned since summer. The North Vietnamese B3 Front, commanded by Major General Hoang Minh Thao, had deliberately prepared the Dak To sector to draw American forces into remote terrain before the planned Tet Offensive.

 A captured NVA sergeant named Vu Hong, who surrendered near Dak To on 3rd November, was carrying orders that laid out the strategy plainly. The mission of the First NVA Division was to annihilate a major US element in order to force the Americans to deploy additional troops to the region. Dakto was not a battle that happened to the Americans.

 It was a battle prepared for them. The 174th NVA Regiment had been on Hill 875 since at least July. Its fortifications were three lines deep, mutually supporting, dug into the hillside, and covered with 6 ft of earth and log overhead. When American aircraft bombed the hill in the days before the assault, the NVA descended into tunnels, waited, and climbed back.

 When the war came back to the surface, they were still there. The regiment’s I and III battalions were hidden on adjacent ridges. The Thai Battalion and Regimental Headquarters occupied the summit. The intelligence that reached the 173rd described a hill held by remnants of a beaten regiment. The hill held a fresh one. It held well over a thousand men.

It had interlocking machine gun positions that covered every approach, and it had a flanking force waiting on the ridges with orders to close behind the Americans once they were committed to the slope, cutting off retreat, cutting off medevac, cutting off resupply. The trap was not improvised. It was an engineering problem solved months in advance waiting for the paratroopers to walk into it.

On the morning of 19th November 1967, roughly 320 paratroopers of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry began moving up the northern spur of Hill 875. Charlie Company, commanded by Captain Harold Kaufman, led on the right. Delta Company, commanded by 1st Lieutenant Bartholomew O’Leary, led on the left. Alpha Company followed to cut a landing zone.

 Each rifleman carried 18 to 20 magazines of M-16 ammunition, plus extras. The NVA held their fire until the Americans were halfway up. When the tree line opened, it opened on three sides. Machine guns, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds walking six at a time across the slope. The point man of Delta Company, SP4 Kenneth Jacobson, was hit by three rounds in the chest and fell backward.

The medic who ran to him was shot through the head reaching him. Charlie Company’s point man and his medic were killed simultaneously on the left side of the trail. The battalion’s commanding officer, LTC Steverson, was directing the battle from a command and control helicopter rather than on the ground. A decision Scott’s War College reconstruction singles out for specific criticism.

 When Delta’s O’Leary came on the radio to warn that something was wrong with the intelligence picture, he was sharply rebuked for breaking in. The companies continued up the hill. By early afternoon, four F-100s had bombed and strafed the summit for an hour. Charlie and Delta rose again. Behind them, the NVA had reoccupied the bunkers through crawl tunnels and were now firing from the rear.

 And then the flanking battalion struck. Full NVA company hit Alpha Company from the west and south. Driving through the thinly stretched rear guard, the wounded waiting at the half-cut landing zone were hit in the open. Captain Kylie’s last radio transmission, “Get everyone you can down here. I need help now.” Then silence.

The battalion was surrounded. PFC Carlos Lozada was 21 years old from the Bronx. He manned an M60 machine gun at the forward outpost when the flanking attack came through. He opened up on the NVA column at close range, then began walking backward up the trail firing the M60 from the hip covering the withdrawal to the perimeter.

 He walked backward firing until he was shot through the head. When the relief battalion reached the base of the hill two days later, the first body they found was Lozada sprawled across his M60. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously. Chaplain Charles J. Waters had said mass that morning at an altar of C ration boxes at the base of the hill.

 Delta Company’s RTO Robert Fleming recalled it was an exceptionally good turnout because everyone knew what they were getting into. Waters was 40 years old. He was a Catholic priest from Jersey City, New Jersey, ordained in 1953, an Army chaplain since 1965. He had completed one tour with the 173rd and been told he could go home.

 He volunteered for a second. When a soldier on the slope asked him where his helmet was, Waters smiled and said, “I carry my protection a little higher.” It was the last time that soldier saw him. Throughout the afternoon, while the perimeter contracted and the casualties mounted, Waters moved in the open. No weapon, moving between the firing lines into the kill zone, carrying wounded back, giving last rites to the dying, crossing into open fire so many times that the battalion stopped counting.

 SP4 Tom Brock, lying in a foxhole, saw him pass. “Tom, I think I’m getting too old for this.” Brock replied, “Father, that makes two of us.” By 1800, Coffman’s status report reached Everson. Roughly 40 dead, 42 wounded, 42 missing presumed dead. The companies were shattered. The ammunition was running low. The perimeter had contracted to a handful of positions on a hillside that was not the summit and was not the base and was not anywhere they called for close air support.

You are lying in the aid station at 1857. The medic gave you a morphine syrette 20 minutes ago. Around you are the other wounded. The ones who can still be reached, the ones who were pulled back from the firing lines when there was still someone to pull them. The command post is grouped around a single large tree at the center of the perimeter.

 Chaplain Waters is somewhere in there with them. You will hear the first bomb. You will not hear the second. SP4 Robert Fleming, the battalion’s radio operator, was standing near the tree when a US close air support aircraft appeared from the south, a direction from which no previous bomb run had come, directly over the American perimeter.

 A departing forward air controller had told his replacement, “10 mi out, to use a small fire on the hillside as a reference point for the fast movers.” That fire had gone out. Another had started further down the hill, closer to the American position. The pilot was told to drop two bombs into the napalm fire near the top of the hill.

 Fleming watched the aircraft bank right and make a second low approach, south to north. He saw the two bombs release and knew immediately. The first hit outside the perimeter, the second hit the branches of the lone tree and burst in the air. An air burst directly over the battalion command post, the aid station, the wounded, and the chaplain.

 Fleming was knocked unconscious, his eardrums ruptured. When he woke, the tree was still standing. The ground beneath it was not the same ground. Bodies and parts of bodies were in every conceivable position of death, scattered beneath the still standing tree. Captain Coffman, his officers, the wounded, medics, and Chaplain Waters had all been killed.

 That is from Scott’s War College reconstruction, built from Fleming’s eyewitness account. 42 paratroopers died in that single blast. 45 more were wounded. Of the battalion’s 16 officers, eight were now dead and eight were wounded. Of the 13 medics who had climbed the hill that morning, 11 were dead. The NVA had not killed that many men all day.

 On 19th of November, the single deadliest day of the entire Dak To campaign, 83 Americans were killed and 110 wounded. Roughly half of those deaths were caused by the bomb. Enemy fire killed 41 paratroopers. An American bomb killed 42. Survivor accounts place Waters on his knees giving last rites at the moment of the bomb.

 The Medal of Honor citation uses more general language. The men who were there remember it more specifically. It may be that both are true. He was always doing both at once. Within minutes, junior officers and NCOs had reestablished the perimeter. O’Leary, blown unconscious by the blast and then revived, took command. Reestablishing the radio net, according to Murphy’s reconstruction, involved moving aside the bodies of the men who had been holding it.

 O’Leary ordered Steverson to terminate all further air strikes. No formal investigation of the bombing was placed on record. No pilot was identified publicly with certainty. Scott’s eyewitness-based account describes a propeller-driven aircraft. Other accounts describe a jet. No Article 32 hearing, no court of inquiry, no documented discipline.

 The Army’s classification for the event was accident. That appears to be where it ended. Dawn on 20th November showed a perimeter of a few hundred survivors. Most officers dead or wounded, out of water and nearly out of medical supplies. The thirst was worse than the wounds for most of the men. SP4 Fleming, wounded twice more during the night, said his tongue had swollen to twice its size and he could barely breathe.

 Wounds were closed with safety pins. Bandoliers served as tourniquets. The landing zone still could not be cut fast enough under fire. Six helicopters had already been lost or badly damaged on the first day trying and NBA anti-aircraft fire from the flanking battalions walled off the sky. The dead became the terrain. Time Magazine’s correspondent on the hill by the relief phase reported a paratrooper moving bodies to dig himself a sleeping trench.

Another used two dead friends to keep himself warm through the cold Highland night. A VFW account quotes a survivor, “You slept with corpses. I slept with Joe. He was dead, but he kept me warm.” AP correspondent Peter Arnett, reporting from the hill in the first days of the siege, wrote, “Hour after hour of battle gave the living and the dead the same gray pallor on Hill 875.

” A dog handler and his German Shepherd had died together in a foxhole. Men offering cigarettes and joking were writhing on the ground wounded minutes later. There was no water for anyone. The dead were stacked six high, covered with ponchos, arms and legs protruding. The relief force, the 4th Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, was ordered up.

 Each rifleman carried 600 rounds, 10 grenades, and extra canteens of water, fully loaded because they knew what they were walking toward. It took them more than 10 hours to cover less than 2 miles. They arrived having eaten all their own food on the march with little water of their own to give. The men on the hill had gone roughly 50 hours without water by the time the relief closed the perimeter.

 On 21st November, the 4th Battalion attacked the crest. Flamethrowers had been dropped without igniters. All laws bounced off the log bunkers. The attack failed after 3 hours. On 22nd November, massed artillery, 8-in guns and 155-mm and 175-mm, plus continuous napalm strikes were turned on the summit. The 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry, was airlifted onto the southern slopes.

On Thanksgiving morning, 23 November, the 4th Battalion and the 112th converged on the summit. The few unwounded survivors of the 2nd Battalion asked to be included and were. When the first men reached the bare scorched crest, 22 minutes after crossing the start line, they gave the paratrooper yell. Geronimo.

 The NVA had abandoned the hill during the night. Time magazine reported, “The North Vietnamese had abandoned Hill 875 during the night, taking many of their dead with them. The summit was a grizzly desolation of charred and splintered trees, burned-out machine guns, and blackened fragments of bodies. Five days, 115 killed across both battalions, 340 casualties out of 570 who assaulted the hill.

 42 of the dead in a single American bomb blast. Johnson ordered the Thanksgiving dinner flown in. It arrived cold. A paratrooper inscribed the inside of his helmet, “Nov 23rd Hill 875 is over.” Thanksgiving Day, Hill 875 was abandoned within days of being taken. Maj. Gen. Charles P. Stone, who took over the 4th Division in January 1968, later said it had absolutely no importance in the war thereafter. None.

 It had no strategic value. 30 paratroopers were drinking rainwater from their poncho liners and waiting for a resupply that could not land. Gen. Westmoreland stood at the National Press Club in Washington and told the assembled press that the war had reached a point where the end begins to come into view. That was the week of Hill 875.

 Three men from the 173rd received the Medal of Honor for the Dak To campaign. PFC Carlos Lozada, PFC John A. Barnes III, who smothered a grenade with his body 10 days before the Hill 875 assault, and Chaplain Charles J. Watters. The citation reads, in part, “Unarmed and completely exposed, he moved among, as well as in front of the advancing troops, giving aid to the wounded, assisting in their evacuation, giving words of encouragement, and administering the last rites to the dying.

 When a wounded paratrooper was standing in shock in front of the assaulting forces, Chaplain Watters ran forward, picked the man up on his shoulders, and carried him to safety. He left the perimeter three times in the face of small arms, automatic weapons, and mortar fire to carry and assist the injured troopers to safety. Chaplain Watters was giving aid to the wounded when he himself was mortally wounded.

 He is one of nine military chaplains ever to receive the Medal of Honor. The medal was presented posthumously at the White House on 4th November 1969 by Vice President Agnew to his family. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The US Army Chaplain Center and school building is named Waters Hall.

 He had been on his second tour. He had been ordained 14 years and he was on his knees beside a dying soldier doing what crossed into open fire to do all day when the bomb his own side dropped killed them both. If someone in your family served with the 173rd or on any American hilltop in November 1967, leave their name in the comments.

 They should not be forgotten because of who killed them.